Throw regrets out the window. They are time-wasters. They are energy-wasters. They are heart-wasters. Regret regrets, and don’t have them. Why fill up your mind with them?

You don’t have to praise everything you have said or done, but you must let all the past go, all the details of it, all the scenes, all of it, go. Let your thoughts go. No longer hold on to past regrets. You keep rotating them, or seeing them in an infinite mirror, replaying them and replaying them, louder, softer, on and on.

No matter how deeply you may regret your role or speech in the past, there is nothing to regret. You picked up the wrong paper, so to speak, and now it’s right to put that paper down. When you have a letter in your hand, and it’s not the one you want or have good use for, you don’t hang on to it. You don’t think you must keep it near you, have it available at all times. The paper you don’t want, you don’t keep looking at it. You toss it aside. Toss aside regrets once and for all.

Must your regrets be so precious to you? Must they squeeze the heart out of you?

Beloveds, regrets are a dime a dozen. They are not precious. They never were. They just emphasize how mistaken you once were. You already know that. You don’t need reminders. Give yourself a break. If a friend of yours moaned and groaned about past actions, you would kindly tell them to forget about it. Be a friend to yourself. Give yourself good advice. Give yourself good advice now no matter what the errors of the past may have been. Enough self-recrimination. Remember you are a child of God. God never saw anything to forgive. You apparently have. So now forgive yourself. Forgive yourself so that you may forget yourself.

You are not to collect past errors, keep a file of them, alphabetize them. Be done with them! From your point of view, you are an imperfect Human Being. So be it. It’s not a big deal. It’s nothing out of the ordinary. It is quite ordinary.

You have been cutting at your heart. You keep wounding it with regrets. You make your heart a punching bag. You burden it. You mistreat it.

Regrets are not meant to be a way of life. They are not meant to be a part of life at all. If regret you must, then it is to be a quick momentary thing. “Okay, I won’t do that again.” And then go on from there without another passing thought. Instead of self-recrimination, give yourself a hug.

Despite whatever the past has been, you have left it behind. You only keep the illusion of it. Memories are illusions. Nothing more. They may have been true once, but they are no longer true. The past, relegated to memories, causes you pain. Even the happy memories cause you pain. Give up pain. Give it up today once and for all. Abandon it. Leave it in its tracks. Drop it off without a by-your-leave. Pain is like a spider that has dropped on you. Brush it off, and move away from it.

Every once in a while, you clean out your purse. It gets cluttered and heavy, and you empty it out. You have been carrying a huge purse of regrets. Now empty them out. They are old receipts you have been carrying around with you for no good reason at all. Regrets aren’t palliatives. They are old wounds. Stop picking at them. Let them go.